November 30, 2012

Last day to switch from Final Cut, Avid, & save 40%

With Creative Cloud, you can download every Adobe post-production tool — including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop, along with Adobe Prelude™ for logging, SpeedGrade™ for color grading, and Story Plus for scriptwriting — for just US$29.99 a month.

Incredible high-speed cheetah footage

National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo teamed up to create some captivating footage:

Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour.

Stick around ’til 5:40 or so to see the contraption used to drive the camera. Watching the cat pursue the stuffed target, my wife sat next to me & quietly whispered “Get it, get it, get it!” [Via Danny Smythe]

Illustration: 126 wacky gadgets of ACME Corp.

The fictional ACME Corporation appeared in nearly all 43 Coyote & Road Runner cartoons from 1949-1994. They make any product you can imagine. I’ve loved The ACME Corporation since I was a kid because they’re a true dream factory.

How amazing would it be if The ACME Corporation were real? That’s why I made this poster; to make our world a little crazier.

Photoshop Touch adds support for pressure-sensitive styluses, 7″ tablets, more

Pressure-sensitive drawing is at last available on iPad, and I’m delighted that Photoshop Touch (available via the Apple App Store, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore) now supports the Pogo Connect, Jot Touch and JaJa Stylus. The app has also been tuned to support smaller tablets. PM Stephen Nielson writes,

Photoshop Touch 1.4 is now optimized to work on smaller devices, including the iPad mini, Google Nexus 7, and Amazon Kindle Fire 7-inch and 8.9-inch devices. In fact, Photoshop Touch 1.4 will work on any Android 3.1 or later device with at least a 7-inch screen and a resolution of 1024×600.

Other new features:

Smoother brush strokes

Two new Effects: Lens Flare (under “&” menu) and Stamp Pattern

Improved grid layout for projects, tutorials, and images

New support for sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and other registered apps

November 28, 2012

CTRL+Console: iPad control for Lightroom & Premiere Pro

What do you think? It’s great-looking, but I remain a bit skeptical about using touchscreens (which obviously lack the physical variation of a keyboard or dedicated hardware controller) in this way. If you’re a Photoshop user with an iPad, are you using Adobe Nav–and if not, why not? I suspect the problem is that one has to keep glancing over at a touch screen, whereas one can navigate a keyboard (or physical jog wheel, etc.) simply by feel. Yet the concept remains alluring, so I’m curious about others’ assessment.

“The First Ever Music Video Filmed Entirely Using Instagram”

Oh good Lord. Petapixel says, “Director Arturo Perez Jr…. snapped a total of 1905 iPhone photos around San Francisco to capture the story.”

The band writes, “This is the very first music video done entirely on Instagram without any third party alterations. Every single frame of this music video is an actual picture that we ran through Instagram. We never shot any video. We only shot still photography.”

I’m getting a repetitive-stress disorder just thinking about the creation process.

Sneak peek: New Photoshop features for Creative Cloud members

November 26, 2012

Demo: Creating beautiful swirly strokes in Illustrator

“Drawing a perfect curly, swirly Stroke with varying widths,” points out Jeff Witchel, “used to be a tedious task requiring a steady hand and a tremendous amount of ability using the the Pen tool.” In this tutorial he shows off how variable-width strokes in Illustrator make tricky looks much easier to pull off.

Help users contribute to new “community languages”. Those are languages that individual Adobe products don’t currently support and where community contributions may give us an indication which languages Adobe should consider for product inclusion.

November 25, 2012

The Onion skewers social media buffoons

“I’m a successful social media consultant, even though I’ve never had a thought or original idea in my life. But, because my firm charges lots of money, we’ve put social media on some of the tongues of some of the biggest companies in the world.”

November 23, 2012

Typography: Musical history, writ large

The Sony Music Timeline celebrates 125 years of musical history covering almost 150 square meters of wall space in Sony’s Derry Street offices. Using just CNC cut vinyl as the sole medium, 54 columns measuring over 2 meters tall cover feature nearly 1000 of Sony Music’s signed artists from 1887 to the present day.

November 22, 2012

Design goodness: One World Futbol

Sting (yes, that Sting) says, “When Tim Jahnigen came to me with his idea for a football or ‘soccer’ ball that could be played on any surface and would never need a pump and never go flat, I immediately thought of all the millions of children and young people who could use the ball in refugee camps, conflict zones, and poor communities all over the world.” What a cool problem to attack with design.

Chicago in miniature

A great city finally gets its tilt-shift due. I can’t wait to take our lads there for Christmas.

[Via Terri Stone]

Bonus miniaturized water traffic: The “Toy Boats” of Sydney harbor, which Nathan Kaso created by applying a tilt-shift effect in Photoshop, then compiling in LRTimelapse & After Effects, and finally editing in Premiere Pro CS6.

Download the Adobe Creative Cloud Connection

Today Adobe’s previewing the Creative Cloud Connection (download it here), a utility that syncs files on your computer with those in the Adobe Creative Cloud. (Remember, you get 20GB of storage when you subscribe to Creative Cloud, and you get 2GB for free just for signing up.)

So, who cares? Don’t you already get something similar with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.? Yes and no. It’s true that the basic concept is familiar, but Adobe will roll out some really unique capabilities over time. (Trust me, I’m working on some.) For now we’re starting with the basics. VP Jeff Veen writes,

Any file you place into the Creative Cloud folder on your desktop will be available at creative.adobe.com, where it’s easy to browse, get links to share publicly, and leave comments. In fact, if the files were created by one of the Creative Suite apps, you can do even more: manipulate layers on a Photoshop document, page through an InDesign file, or generate a PDF of your work to share with others.

We’ve got lots to come, as well. Up next, we’ll add even more collaboration features, including the ability to share privately with workgroups as well as browse and restore previous versions of files.

Zapped to the beat

During the synth intro, you see five sets of arms wiggle listlessly. When the beat kicks in, they pump with a bit more rhythm. But the faceless performers aren’t dancing–well, at least not of their own volition. Instead, they’re serving as a human visualizer, shocked into action (literally) by carefully placed electrodes.

November 19, 2012

A Friendly Photoshop Forum

If you or someone you know is in the early stages of exploring Photoshop, there’s a new learning destination that’s worth a visit. Photoshop for Beginners is a sub-forum on Adobe.com that is tailor-made for newcomers to the powerful but complex software.

Ask any question in Photoshop for Beginners and you’ll receive an answer that emphasizes visuals — including video how-tos — and steers clear of unnecessary jargon.

Lytro cameras add “perspective shift”

Remember that Wayne’s World “Camera one, camera two!” scene where he opens & closes one eye at a time? (No, you probably weren’t born when that came out; but I digress.) Lytro’s “perspective shift” feature works a bit like that, letting you switch among two subtly different points of view on the same scene:

It’s cool, though my big hope here remains that such technology offers a better way to select elements in a photo by detecting their varying depths. [Via]

iPad laser virtual keyboard

“It’s the most fun you can have with lasers without a cat,” they say. Hmm—be that as it may, I have a hard time imagining people shelling out $179 and then using this thing comfortably. Still clever, though.

This means that Photoshop Touch is optimized for both 8.9-inch and 7-inch screens, giving users a great experience on all recent Kindle Fire devices. (This does not include the 1st generation Kindle Fire, but only the newer devices running Android 4.0.)

The Photoshop Touch team is constantly looking at new devices and form factors and is committed to bringing the core Photoshop features to new devices. Please keep an eye out for additional updates coming and make sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Sculpture: Aluminum casts of ant colonies

Nothing tells someone “I’m a huge fan of your work & want to share it with others” like pouring a vat of scalding liquid metal into their home, incinerating their whole tribe. But if you can get past that, Walter Tschinkel’s aluminum casts of ant colonies (see photos) are pretty amazing.

Behind The Muscle Music

In August I pointed out the inspired lunacy of Old Spice’s Muscle Music (see below, especially if you have Flash installed as it becomes interactive at the end). Now Jake Friedman, creative director and co-founder of LA-based Wildlife, offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the ambitious project.

We worked with Adobe Flash, Flash Builder, After Effects, Photoshop, and Media Encoder. There were a huge number of assets moving back and forth across these products, so it was important that they could integrate to the pipeline seamlessly. We also benefited greatly from Photoshop’s recent addition of video integration and support. […]

We also had to crop these videos to their minimum canvas area in order to speed up performance for both pieces of software and avoid layering dozens of full-screen clips over one another. Photoshop was a champion here…

November 10, 2012

Color mixing comes to Paper

The amazing thing isn’t that the folks at FiftyThree poured a year’s worth of work into “just” color mixing in their iPad app Paper. The amazing thing is that they had the guts to ship a drawing app without as basic & obvious a feature as color picking—and that by all accounts the app was a big hit without it.

Illustration: Crazy dubstep animation

This certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and you’d do well to skip right ahead to 1:20 or so, but at that point it showcases some great illustrations: “The animation section was created by taking illustrations by Adam Relf, prepping them in Photoshop then animating and compositing in After Effects. I did the final compile in Adobe Premiere.”

November 07, 2012

A Photoshopper meets POTUS

This is so great. 24-year-old A. J. Brockman can move only his facial muscles and three fingers of his left hand, yet he just got to give his portrait of the First Family to President Obama:

“He ducked out of the security area and came over to us. He said, ‘Did you do that magnificent painting?’” recalled Brockman, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens.

The president lingered a few minutes, asking about Brockman’s computer painting technique. The president posed for photos and signed Brockman’s copy of the painting: “Thanks for the wonderful portrait…you make us proud! Barack Obama.”

“He told me he hoped it would one day hang in his personal library. He was such a dude,” said Brockman.

Five days later, the “New York Times” ran a half-page photo of a presidential aide carrying Brockman’s painting off Air Force One.

Illustration: Re-creating John Lennon’s poster

Beatles fan Peter Dean enlisted woodcarver Andy English in re-creating a Victorian circus poster that inspired John Lennon to write the song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, which appeared on The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:

Lennon bought the poster in an antiques shop and hung it in his music room. While writing for Sgt. Pepper one day, he drew inspiration from the quirky, old-fashioned language and set the words to music… It is printed in a limited edition of 1,967.

Behind the scenes of that amazing photo of Manhattan

“[It was] the kind of shot which was impossible to take before this camera was there,” Baan said.

It was more difficult to rent a car than a helicopter in New York the day after Sandy, Baan said. And because there was such limited air traffic so soon after the storm, air traffic control allowed Baan and the helicopter to hover very high above the city, a powerful advantage for the photo.

Demo/Q&A: Switching to Premiere Pro, Part 2

As you make the switch to Adobe® Premiere Pro, you’ll find many ways to get things done. What you may miss are some hidden gems you don’t know to look for. In this fast paced webinar, join Richard Harrington as he shares the advanced techniques that will speed up your workflow. This webinar is designed for experienced editors who want to jump in and get results.

November 04, 2012

Photoshop/Lightroom tour of Asia/Pac

Russell Preston Brown and I set off this weekend for the Adobe Eclipse Tour! We’ll be stopping in Korea, Singapore and Australia for a full day of Photoshop and Lightroom training. Click the links below for more information.

November 03, 2012

Amazing 360º video from a Formula 1 car

November 02, 2012

Microsoft’s offbeat Digits hand-gesture sensor bracelet

“Dear society: You got used to seeing people talk into space & learned to figure ‘Bluetooth, not schizophrenia.’ Now let’s see you get used to dead-eyed zombies fidgeting with the air to turn virtual dials as they walk. [Here’s more info.]” —Love, the tech industry

I kinda want to get one of these into—or rather, next to—Russell Brown’s hands.

Summly, a polished new newsreader

I just came across Summly, a free, pretty app for reading news on iPhone. It makes extensive use of swiping (left/right to navigate among articles, up/down to drill in deeper or to go up a level), and it’s full of carefully executed little details (parallax, subtle animation, etc.). Check it out:

November 01, 2012

Premiere Pro & co. clean up on Readers’ Choice awards

I try to keep self-congratulatory posts to a minimum, but it’s nice to see the momentum around Adobe Premiere Pro & other Adobe video tools. Streaming Magazine just announced a number of Readers’ Choice Awards:

Adobe Premiere Pro — Best Product of the Year Award for Desktop Video Editing Software

Adobe Auditude – Best Product of the Year Award for Video Advertising Management Platform

Adobe Media Server – Best Product of the Year Award for Server Hardware/Software

Adobe SiteCatalyst – Best Product of the Year Award for Reporting and Analytics Platform

To help place cuts in interview video, our interface links a text transcript of the video to the corresponding locations in the raw footage. It also visualizes the suitability of cut locations… Editors can directly highlight segments of text, check if the endpoints are suitable cut locations and if so, simply delete the text to make the edit. For each cut our system generates visible (e.g. jump-cut, fade, etc.) and seamless, hidden transitions.